Omega-3 can now be made from algae, not overfished sardines

This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Six hundred sardines are needed to make a 500mg bottle of omega-3 health supplement. Fredrika Gullfot wants to change that by swapping fish for algae. As the CEO and founder of Swedish agri-startup Simris Alg, Gullfot had the big idea of using algae to curb one of the biggest drivers of overfishing. "If they're faced with increasing amounts of easily available alternatives, people will be more inclined to switch from fish oil," she says, "and fish-oil omega-3s will essentially become redundant."

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Her fascination for algae began when she was a graduate student in Sweden bioengineering plants. But when she finished her thesis, Gullfot found there was no Swedish algae industry to work in, so she started it herself - turning a small greenhouse into Sweden's first algae farm for oil production. Unlike her biggest competitor, Gullfot avoids funghi-like algae, which need to be fed sugars to live and breed. "We grow algae that are like plants," says Gullfot. All they need is sunlight and carbon dioxide, which they convert into fuel and nutrients. "For each kilo of algae we produce, we consume 4kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

Now Gullfot is expanding. "The market for omega-3s is growing quite fast," she says. With the addition of a 2,000m<sup>2</sup> greenhouse, she expects to increase production from a few thousand bottles to a quarter of a million by the end of this year -- five per cent of the Swedish market. "It's small, but we're getting there," she says. "The cool thing for us is that we have shown that this can actually be done on an industrial scale."

This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine